


What a Heart Means

by StevetheIcecube



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Torna - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-05 20:11:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15178421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StevetheIcecube/pseuds/StevetheIcecube
Summary: Blades, multi-purpose AIs contained within mechanical bodies, are everywhere. They do everything. Yet still, humans pushed the science further and further until the boundaries between humans and blades were miniscule. And experimentation came with consequences, and larger error margins.A soldier who broke from his protocols and saved a child. An interrogator rescued by her emergency medic. A soldier, who came from somewhere unknown on a mission corrupted out of his memory. The child of a man who had the wrong views at the wrong time, snatched from everything he knew. And when small problems come together, big problems surface.





	1. Leave

**Author's Note:**

> Rip in multi chapter fanfics amirite

"Sir, professor, sir, do you actually think blades severed from people are beings in their own right?" The voice didn't echo in the large lecture theatre. But to everyone there, it felt like it did. It was a very weighted question and had been on the minds of everyone present after the recent press coverage of the professor. The man in question sighed and turned back to the microphone.

"For the record, yes," he said. "Humans and blades do not have many differences. Blades separated from people are still people. They're capable of very human emotions. Advances in blade technology over the last few years has put them ahead of any predictions in terms of artificial intelligence. Whether their emotions and thoughts are simulated or not, they still think and feel those things. Blades are alive."

The hall was silent. A few people clapped hesitantly. It was a tense atmosphere. The professor left, and the room was filled with murmuring. The die had been cast, so to speak, and events were about to spiral out of the man's control.

-

A man was operating under the cover of darkness, even if his work took place in the middle of a secure facility. His experiments almost always failed. Glass and metal and skin and blood did not form into a coherent unit. The desired outcomes never came to light. He wasn't sure if they ever would, in the conditions he was working under. Failed experiment after failed experiment. He knew what he needed, but his sponsors always refused.

Until that day. Do what you will with her- it, because we need her out of the way. There were reasons. The researcher didn't need to know those reasons. He was pretty sure he could guess.

The poor thing didn't know what was going on, but he felt only the smallest amount of sympathy. This was exactly what he needed. An existing brain, and living body, and all the machine parts he could ever need. And for once, all the tests came up positive and he had succeeded.

-

He didn't know how he'd slipped through their net. He'd broken free of their control in a pretty bad way for them. He didn't know why. He didn't know what had happened or why he'd snapped or even exactly what he'd done. He felt like that whole time was trapped in a glass bowl, battering at the insides, scrambling at the walls, and never getting out. But now he was on the other side. He was never going back.

There had been bodies. Now the bodies were a several mile walk away. He didn't know how they hadn't found him. He didn't know why they were still letting him roam free like this. He'd killed his own navigating detectors while cutting their signal from them to him and back again. He had no idea where he was. For all he knew, he'd lost all understanding of movement and was walking in circles.

Something decidedly large shuffled in the woods nearby. He sank into a crouch and listened intently. He was not keen on giving up his newfound freedom.

-

It was a simple task. He had to defend her. She was sent to intimidate, to persuade, and potentially (probably) to maim. It was a heavy task. She never enjoyed their sadness and she did not appreciate his company through everything, even if he tried to help her.

She sank further inside herself as time went on. It hurt him. It wasn't fair that she should suffer. She was important, and she hated these tasks. Why was she asked to do them if they knew she hated it? They knew she found it hard, because he existed to help her. He wouldn’t be there if she didn’t need him.

It felt like helping her to the best of his ability went against her own orders. In his opinion, which was solely formed by information gathered on her wellbeing, the best thing for her was to not go on these tasks. But here she was, being forced to do it. Because she couldn't do anything else. She wasn't meant to, wasn't allowed to.

And one day it snapped. She said, one morning, in a small voice, privately to him, that she didn't want to go out today. She didn't want to hurt the young man who was suspected of some crime so she could get the desired response from him. She didn't feel like she could cause suffering any longer.

So he barricaded the door. She watched him. He made her stay where she was and just stop for a while. Then, when they were warned they had to obey, he took her by the hand and they left through the window. It was easy. He hated himself for not just doing it before, saving her before she reached that point of despair when she actually confided in him.

But it was done now. It was done, and they were gone from her sad existence of hurting and his sadness of watching her suffer. They were done and they were free. For as long as they could manage it, anyway.

-

He'd fallen out of a plane, he thought. Or maybe something else. He didn't really know. He didn't want to know. His memory banks had been corrupted by fire damage. Something bad must have happened to him. His connection to everything had been destroyed in the crash and it was hard to know what had happened in the recent past when he had no direction.

His programming told him to wait to be contacted. So at first, he did. His programming told him of nameless, faceless masters (who had maybe been partially wiped from his memory by the corruption) who he had to stay loyal to. But they didn't come. It didn't feel like they were even trying to come. Any weak signals he'd been picking up initially faded very quickly, quickly enough that he doubted they had ever existed. But he didn't see why he should stay loyal to people who didn't give a damn.

Sitting around waiting sounded like a bad choice to him. His diagnostics told him that his decision management protocols were faltering. He told himself that he didn't need the protocols and he had enough damn common sense on his own. It was an angry realisation. But the anger kept him going, forced him to move so he could survive longer, and it didn't go away. It was preserving him.

He didn't know who had abandoned him. But he didn't care any more. This was his path, not the path of people his brain couldn't even fully compute. He was going to live to find his own meaning, even if he didn't understand what kind of world he'd landed in.


	2. Survival

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Identity, names, protection, survival.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the response to the last chapter :D this is super fun to write.

The man in front sighed. He tapped his foot. He squinted. He wrote on a tablet he was holding. He spoke, but the words were only barely understood.

"It has no sense of self," he said, sighing again. "I didn't think it would need mind awareness facilities like that. I suppose it was logical, but it didn't occur to me when I was working. I'm sure I can work something out to add it in. The brain is more computer than chemical at this point."

Inside, a spark of something. It was not understood, or interpreted, because there were faulty systems. Many faulty systems. Nothing was working as it should.

The man paused, and moved to a computer at the side. All went dark.

-

"Do you want a name?" He asked. He'd been thinking about names. Humans had them to identify each other and call to each other. Blades didn't need that. Blades had numbers to identify themselves and others. But he loathed the impersonal way they had been forced to act. He wanted something more meaningful.

"If you want." She said it as if she didn't care. He was no longer constantly monitoring her mental state, at her request (it was creepy, she said, and unnecessary), but he was still good at reading her from his accumulated data. He could tell she cared.

"I don't know how to name things," he admitted. "I'm not sure if I'm that creative, honestly." He was creative, he thought. When he wasn’t using heavy amounts of processing power, his mind was always drifting off, imagining things that weren’t real. And names? He had hundreds tucked in his data banks but he didn’t think she’d like any of them.

"Akhos," she said immediately. "I heard someone say it before. It sounds sort of stupid so maybe you'd think it fits you." He felt like pointing out that Akhos was a name they’d heard as they were wandering through the streets on a broadcast informing people of dangerous criminals that needed to be avoided, but he couldn’t deny that it felt right.

“I’m flattered,” he said. He looked at her and tried to reach into his thoughts where somewhere, maybe, there’d be a name. He opened his mouth, hoping that the syllables would drop out unthinkingly, like how she’d named him. “I can’t think of anything for you.” Paris was the name she used if the situation called for a human name, but it had never really been her.

“Doesn’t matter that much,” she said, giving him a dismissive kind of look. “Names are for humans. We don’t need names.”

“We didn’t need to disobey their orders either,” he pointed out. “This defying them, it’s more about...proving that we matter too. They saw us as machines who had a task, so I’d quite like to be a person. Like them.”

“Akhos…” The name sounded strange to him. Not quite right yet. Registering it in his databanks as a phrase to automatically respond to felt like cheating. “We’re not like them. We can’t be. We can run from them, sure, and we can hide as long as we want among them, pretending we’re one of them, but we’re not. If you want a name, want it for yourself, not just to be like them.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll keep thinking.” He smiled at her. She deserved to have a name, but it needed to be a good one. She didn’t deserve anything less.

-

He held the jagged piece of metal cautiously across his body as he creeped towards the source of the movement. It had been shorn off from...somewhere. He didn’t think it was a part of his own body, anyway. As he got closer to where he thought the movement had come from, he detected a weak heat signal. A small creature of some kind, lying in a ditch just in front of him. A...human, yet the heat signature was too weak for a human’s standard body temperature.

He approached, and the figure made a noise of fear. He looked at it. A human child. A quick scan told him the child was unarmed. Not a threat. “P-please don’t hurt me…” Their voice quaked with fear.

Words failed him for a moment. They were afraid of him. He lowered the piece of metal. “Get down, please!” They said, sounding more urgent. “He’s coming!”

He didn’t know what that meant, but he crouched in the ditch with the child. He didn’t want them to scream and give their position away. He felt more comfortable facing an attacker head on, but he’d never fought when there were innocents around. He’d never fought when not backed up by a whole platoon of models just like him.

A heat signature moved closer. This one was bright, unlike the child next to him who was clearly chilled to the bone. The figure (the man the child had been referring to?) was drawing closer, and as he did so he was very loud. He crushed the undergrowth, moving with no subtlety or care at all.

The child was terrified. They were shaking. He focused on the figure, what must have produced so much hatred. He scanned what he could gather from the information he was getting. Judging by the speed of the steps and the weight of the disruptions, he was tall, but not fat nor hugely muscly. But if he focused his sense receptors, he could hear the movement of a large metal item hitting the side of the man’s leg with every other step. A gun, or a club.

The child was afraid. The man was armed. The child was hiding, miles from civilisation (as far as he could tell), with no one to help...except him. “You’re safe now,” he said, gently moving the child behind him so he would be the one the man saw first, if he looked their way. “I’ll protect you.”

-

Slowly, his systems started reorienting to tell him what was going on. Lengthy hours of recalibration had most of his limbs and senses at least functioning, though he wasn’t sure how accurate everything was. Making sense of everything was difficult, but he was getting there.

He’d been sent somewhere on a plane. That’s how much he’d managed to figure out. Then there must have been a fire, or an explosion, because his last uncorrupted memory data was data on a dangerous heat signal. And he was on the ground now when before he’d been up in the air. His altitude sensors were completely out of sync, to the extent that he’d just decided to turn them off. They were wasting computing power.

The rage building up in him wasn’t stopping, which was vaguely concerning. He was aware that he wasn’t meant to exceed a protocol level of strong negative or positive emotion, somewhere in the back of his programming, but he’d elected to ignore that. If he wasn’t angry, he wouldn’t have any reason to keep trying to preserve himself. And he wanted to live.

He’d managed to identify that he was in woodlands now. Dense woodlands, and off in the distance there was civilisation. But judging by the circumstances in which he’d come to be here, he didn’t think going to civilisation would be a good idea. There were large chunks missing from his chest sections and his left arm was fried up to the middle of his bicep. He was aware that this would alarm humans. And he wanted to be in control of his own fate.

He didn’t have anything to patch himself up, though, which was a problem. He must have wandered away from the area of the crash at some point. There were no supplies and no trace of where he’d come from or where he should go. He just had to keep moving, keep his systems running, and survive. Once things were as good as they could get on his end, he’d decide what to do properly.


	3. Personhood

“I still don’t think it can understand,” the man said. He tried to move, tried to tell them he could, but he wasn’t able to. Something was shut off, inside him. His mind didn’t connect to his limbs. “This is a loss, Amalthus. We’ll have to get rid of it, if anyone finds the evidence and see that we failed it could be ruinous.”

He may not understand much, with everything blurry and frazzled, but he understood that. “No, we can’t give up on it,” the man on the left said. “The programme is running, even though it’s not one of a serviceable blade. It’s...something to do with the connection to the human body. That’s what’s not working.”

“What do you propose doing?” The man asked. There was a hint of derision in his voice, but he didn’t know what that meant. “You’ve already tried turning things on and off multiple times. You’ve hooked up all the receptors properly. The technology just doesn’t work. We have to get rid of it.”

“It will work!” He insisted. “Give me time. I can figure it out.”

“You’re playing at being the Architect, Amalthus,” the man said. Dimly, somewhere, he registered what that meant. He didn’t understand how it applied to the situation. “Careful it doesn’t backfire on you.”

-

He knew the man would see him. His head was practically level with the ground, and his white hair just plain didn’t blend in with the ground. It never mattered when it was hidden under a helmet, but he’d discarded that...somewhere. He was pretty sure they filmed his performance using the helmet so he had to get rid of it.

He was ready to deal with it. He was more worried about the child. This man seemed to be out to get the child, and he wasn’t just about to allow it. He could take a single, human man with ease. But if he had friends, and if he decided to target the child, he might have a little more of a problem on his hands.

The man walked practically over his head. He was tempted to trip him or stab him in the base of the foot as he passed, but he wanted to have the chance of keeping the child as safe as possible if he could. He did not want that man to open fire on the pair of them.

But then the man stopped. He turned around, and came back. "Lora!" He called. That must be the child. "Come on honey. Your mother's worried sick about you. You wouldn't leave her on her own, would you?" Behind him, the child trembled more, but they made no effort to push him away. He stayed firmly in place.

The man got dangerously close. He knew that, if the man started shooting at them, things could go wrong very quickly. He needed to seize any surprise he could. Attempting to analyse eventualities as quickly as possible, he stabbed the man in the ankle with the piece of metal in his hand before grabbing the man's other ankle and unbalancing him so he fell to the ground. The man cried out and reached for the gun but it was within his reach now and the man was in pain, so he grabbed it away from him and shot him through the chest. And then twice more, for good measure. It was over very quickly.

Reflecting on it for a moment, he heard the scream of pain and surprise, the body hitting the ground, the frantic clattering of the gun, the sound of the trigger, the shot fired once and then twice. He could feel...there was blood dripping onto him. He'd made a mess of this. The commander wouldn't have been pleased, but the commander didn't control him anymore.

The child was crying. He pushed the body away from the ditch and climbed out. He wiped his hands on a largely unbloodied section of the dead man's clothing (he noted that the trousers were still intact and resolved to take them, but now was not the time). He discarded the gun, throwing it so it clattered a short distance away. Far enough, hopefully, for the child to feel safe, but close enough if he needed to pick it up again to deal with another threat.

He offered the child his hand, and they took it, allowing him to pull them out of the ditch. Their eyes skirted the dead body for a moment before they rapidly and pointedly withdrew. Then they wrapped their arms around his waist. For a moment, he was alarmed, but from somewhere he managed to register that this was probably an expression of thanks from the child.

The problem now was that he had no idea what to do with children. He’d been trained as a soldier, not an aid worker. He didn’t know how to deal with this situation. As gently as he could, he patted the child’s head. After a moment they drew away from him. “Where are you going, mister?” The child asked. “I-I don’t think I can go home.”

“I don’t know,” he said. He hadn’t made a plan. He’d acted impulsively and he didn’t really understand why, he just knew that he’d had enough. “But you can- you can come with me. If you need protection.”

-

“Patroka,” he said. They were on a bus, going nowhere, and it was the middle of the night. She was sitting on a set of seats across the aisle from him, and that was when it came to him. “How about Patroka?”

"What do you mean, Patroka?" She asked. It took her a couple of moments, but when she realised, Akhos caught a hint of a smile. It was already worth it. "Oh. It's okay. Better than anything else you suggested."

"Patroka it is, then," he said, smiling back at her. "When are we getting off?"

"Bus routes aren't particularly predictable," she said, "and this line is free. It'll take them a while to work it out, so we're safe here. For now."

"But we need to stop to remove the trackers," he said. "They can't stay in place or we'll be found and intercepted eventually. And we can't just do it while we're here." Right now, he regretted grabbing Patroka and just running. It hadn't been the smartest thing to do at all. He should have planned ahead, but until he did it he had barely even thought about it.

"What do you need to do?" She asked. "Does the tracker just go offline, or can you remove it and plant it somewhere?"

"The former," he replied. "So they'll be able to track where it went offline and try and predict our movements from there."

"Can't you turn mine off now?" Patroka asked. Akhos shook his head. It was too difficult to do in a moving vehicle. He didn't have the power capacity nor the correct priorities in her mind to meddle like that. "We need to do it before they can mobilise against us."

He knew that. For all they knew, they could have already been found out, and a response team could be on their way to apprehend them now. He didn't want that to happen. He was afraid of that happening. But they had to keep going. "I'll do it as soon as I can," he said. "Once we're somewhere quiet, it's the first thing I'll do."

-

His first priority once his systems were functioning as fully as he could get them to (his decision making protocols were apparently completely bust and his memory so corrupted that he had to give up on those) was to find some shelter. His exposed internal workings would not deal well if they got more damaged than they already were, so that was the most important thing to work on in that moment.

The shelter under the trees of this forest had been fine for then, but he knew it wouldn’t stay fine for long. His sensors were telling him that rain was likely in the near future, and he didn’t want that to get on his frazzled arm. With that in mind, he ran a quick topography scan of the surrounding area and worked out where the nearest cave system was. The answer was too far away. To get there, he’d have to cross through at least one heavily populated area, and he’d already decided that contact with humans was out of the question. He’d have to find somewhere else.

Instead, he decided to run a scan for any metal in the area, hoping that he’d find a small shelter of some kind that could keep him safe from the rain, and he hit on a few things immediately. Why hadn’t he scanned for that before? He wandered in the direction of it after checking for heat signals, finding none.

Navigating the deep woods with only one arm was more challenging than navigating the area that had been a little more sparse. There were branches in his way constantly and they scratched at the insides of his arm. He didn’t feel pain, exactly, but it was an irritant and he didn’t want to damage it more than he already had.

As he got closer to the metal he’d picked up on, he realised it was moving. Moving towards him, loosely. And there was a heat signal, too. A human and a blade, also moving through the woods. He didn’t know what to do, honestly. He wasn’t afraid of what would happen if he encountered someone, but he was concerned that he may not survive the encounter unscathed. 

He ducked down below a particularly thick set of branches to make his way through by crawling along the forest floor, and that’s when he saw them. A blade with a shock of white hair, in combat armour and stained with blood, and on his shoulders, a child with red hair, smiling as they both walked. The blade being accompanied by a mere child definitely told him where he was going to get his spare parts from.


	4. Safety

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was going to post this this morning but AO3 was down :(

The child screamed the moment he approached, and he found himself almost immediately looking at decidedly the wrong end of a gun. This had been poorly judged. He didn't want to get shot. That really, really wouldn't work. In the back of his mind, a warning popped up that he shouldn't engage an armed opponent when he was unarmed. It was appreciated but definitely belated. Maybe he shouldn't have acted so impulsively.

"I don't know who you are," the blade said, "but don't try to hurt me. You won't win."

"I'm aware of that," he said, stalking a loose circle around the pair. The gun stayed trained on him and no weaknesses presented themselves. This wasn't looking good.

"You're injured and desperate, I understand." The blade's blue eyes held some kind of emotion he didn't really want to think about. "But I won't let you hurt Lora. Just let us be."

"And what's a combat blade doing in the middle of a forest with a child, covered in blood?" He asked. He needed to maintain some kind of upper hand here.

"I could ask the same of a foreign strike model blade," the blade said. As they spoke, they lowered the child from their shoulders, not taking their eyes off of him. "Especially one who's damaged and unarmed like you. I don't imagine you want me to report you to any authorities nearby. I could do that in an instant."

"I don't imagine you're doing something that the authorities want you to," he said. The blade obviously recognised things about him that he didn't know, due to his corrupted data, but that didn't mean he should let them know that. It was just another weakness he needed to hide. "So I don't think you'll do that."

The blade sighed, looked at the child, and clearly made up their mind. "Are you following orders?" They asked.

"Fuck no," he said. The child looked visibly afraid, but the blade didn't react with more than a quirk of their mouth. "When I woke up my orders told me to wait, but nothing happened. So I decided they were a bunch of trash."

The blade nodded. "I'm looking for shelter," they said. "Lora needs to get warm and I need to find her some food. If you can be trusted, I have a limited pack of medical supplies. It's no spare arm, but it should stop further damage."

He shrugged. He didn't think that protecting a child would go anywhere. But he needed all the help he could get to survive this, honestly. "I'm in," he said. "You can call me Malos." It was a name and it came from somewhere in his specifications. Maybe it was a model number, or an official name, or something. He didn't know.

"Well, Malos," the blade said, finally lowering their gun, tightly securing it to their waist where they could clearly easily get to it again. "We need to find some shelter, and then we can get down to business."

-

Malos walked slightly in front of them, his gait uneven because of the lost weight in his arm and the chunk taken out of his chest. He was only glad that blades didn’t bleed like humans, because he didn’t want Lora seeing anything worse than she had already. He didn’t know why he felt so protective of her, why it was this of all things that motivated him now, but it did. It was a flaw or chink in his programming somewhere, for sure, there’d been an error, but the whole world seemed different now. And he needed to protect her.

She walked next to him, not saying a word as they moved through the woods. It was cold out here, his heat sensors told him, and while she was wearing appropriate clothing for the cold, it was only going to get darker and colder later and she was already shivering. He didn’t know much about how humans worked, but he didn’t think that was a good sign. And he really didn’t want her to get hurt because of it, so they needed to find shelter.

“It’s going to rain soon,” Malos said, because of course a strike blade would have sensors for that kind of thing. At least Malos seemed to be on their side, while it suited him at least. He didn’t know how long that would last, but the other blade seemed to be pretty badly damaged and wouldn’t do well on his own.

“We need to find shelter, then,” he said. “Lora needs somewhere dry to stay and getting your components wet won’t do you any favours.” The rare spark flying from Malos’ damaged nerve endings was making him nervous as it was.

“There’s a metal structure in this direction,” he said. “My locators are mostly functioning but I can’t tell the exact distance. I think it’s close, though.” He wondered for a moment if that was how Malos found the pair of them. “It’s large, but not large enough to be somewhere a cluster of people may be.”

Good, he thought, because Malos didn’t seem like he’d be much use in a fight. He may have approached them offensively, but he clearly hadn’t had a plan beyond ‘attack these people’ and he was gravely damaged. He was actually sort of surprised that the blade was still moving. “Good,” he said, leaving it at that.

Lora squeezed his hand. She hadn’t said much, yet, but he was giving her time. She may not want to speak around Malos, not until she could trust him, anyway. But she was staying strong, and she kept walking until they came into a large circular area. It was mostly clear of trees, and the ground was dusty. The trees stretched above them still, but the main point of interest in the clearing was what lay on the other end of it.

He loosely recognised it as a train carriage, though it took a moment because the displacement from its context didn’t make any sense. It was just there, upright, sitting there. It was very strange. All three of them had stopped on seeing it, but it was Lora who let go of his hand and ran to look at it.

The train carriage was empty. There were two sets of doors, with one left slightly ajar. All the windows were closed but, most importantly, still intact. If they could find something to cover the gap in the door, it would be quite warm. The seats were slightly ratty from years of use, and there were clear signs of animals having used the carriage at some point, but they were gone now, and plenty of the seats were still useable. There was even a set of six seats in a cluster that Lora would be able to lie down on.

“Jin, it’s like the Monoceros from the story,” Lora said, and he blinked. She had addressed him by a name that registered dimly as something from the past that he didn’t have much information on. It wasn’t his own name, but she’d called him by it.

“The battleship?” He asked, and she nodded, jumping to try and see the top of what he presumed was a luggage rack. He hooked his arms around her and raised her up so she could see it. “It’s a missing bit of a train, Lora.”

“The Monoceros was a safe place for the soldiers,” Lora said solemnly, though he could hear a smile in her voice despite not being able to see her face. “It can be a safe place for us too.”

He nodded, and lowered her back to the ground. Immediately, she moved to sit on one of the seats, swinging her legs but looking very tired at the same time. It must have been a long day for her, with all this stress. He couldn’t help but worry about how she was going to eat and drink. There was no water here, other than a stream they’d passed quite a while ago, and they had nothing to collect water with. There was also no food, and he knew children needed food to live.

“So, Jin, is it?” Malos asked. He thought for a moment before responding.

“I suppose it is,” he said. “I suppose you want my medical supplies and then to go on your way.”

“Not exactly,” Malos said. “I have nowhere to go. You have nowhere to go, and you need to look after that kid of yours. What do you say we call ourselves a pair?”

-

“Ow! Akhos, why does it hurt?” Patroka asked, pushing him away again. He sighed and collected his thoughts. He knew he had to be patient with her. She wasn’t used to this kind of thing, and this was meant to be getting her to not suffer anymore.

“It’s invading areas of your programming that neither of us are meant to touch,” he explained, stepping back to give her some space. He knew it hurt. “Once it’s done, though, they won’t be able to find us. We’ll be free. So, please, just give me a couple of minutes. I know it hurts, and I’m sorry. But it’s necessary.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “It just hurts, alright? I’m not used to things hurting.” It was ingenious, if Akhos was being honest. Making them impervious to pain and then giving them a pained reaction to trying to break out of being tracked. It meant that even if they tried, many wouldn’t be able to do it.

He’d already done his own, and the pain was only matched by having to watch Patroka suffer so much every day under the humans’ instructions. He leaned in again, and pressed one hand to the side of Patroka’s head, the other to her wrist. This was the easiest way to get in. He just hoped it would work this time.

When it was done, she wouldn’t talk to him for a while. They sat, the pair of them, on a train that would take them to the other side of the city. He didn’t mind her silence, knowing that they were safe. They had ages left to talk. For now, they just needed to get away from where the tracker signal went dead so the authorities definitely lost track of them. They could work out their next moves then.

-

“I told you it would work!” The scientist called Amalthus crowed. “There you go. A human blade, so to speak. It looks like a human female, and on any heat scans for blades, it shows up as human. Yet its mind is that of a blade, and it has the capacity of a blade. Perfect, if I do say so myself.”

"It looks barely older than a child," the other scientist said. "A female teenager isn't going to get anywhere important. And you forget that the child is a real person. A real person who is being looked for. I see no benefits to that at all."

"You'd be surprised at what a teenage girl wearing a hoodie can do," Amalthus said. "It may have no use infiltrating a government building, but that's not the only thing that's important these days. It can attend and disrupt protests, or spread things online. It has a purpose."

"I still think it's a liability." He felt strange. The people referring to him existed on the other side of a wall. He was trapped inside the wall, desperately trying to break out, but nothing happened. He couldn't break it and he couldn't climb over it.

He had to do things at their orders. He could scream that he didn't want to as much as he could from inside his cell, but there was nothing he could do to prevent his body, which was all wrong, and his voice, which was so so wrong, do things he didn't want to do. He was meant to be somewhere else, that much he knew, but he couldn't remember where. There had been an image inside his head of a man wearing glasses smiling at him, talking to him, the actual him, but he didn't know if it was invented or not. It probably was.

He heard it all and he saw it all. It was him doing it but it wasn't him. It was his body (except it was so wrong), but it acted without thinking. Or maybe it was thinking, he just couldn’t hear its thoughts and couldn’t influence anything. It was scary. He was afraid, and in off moments he caught himself wishing he could go home. He just didn’t know where home was these days. He didn’t remember having a home.


	5. Changes

Something had gone wrong. He understood what his body had been doing, what was meant to happen, but something had gone wrong and he was face down on a cold, wet pavement, but there was heat behind him. People were screaming, and he could feel something trickling down his right temple.

A handful of gunshots. More screaming. Why wasn’t his body moving? Every time danger showed up, whatever was controlling his body got well out of the way. It was part of his mission to make it out unscathed so he could go to something else afterwards. But it wasn’t happening this time.

Gunshots filled the air again. He squeezed his eyes shut.

He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He opened them again. He could move.

So he could move. He was free. Free of the hell of watching things go by and being unable to act on it. But now he didn’t know what to do. He was in a dangerous situation and there was no detachment from it to save him. More gunshots sounded. He had to stop panicking and get out of here.

He breathed in, then breathed out, and started to crawl slowly towards a street. He’d been in a square, and that was where the police had opened fire. He must have fallen to the ground and hit his head when they started, and something had exploded and knocked him to the ground, which left him here. And something had clearly been knocked out of place, though he didn’t understand what, and he wasn’t going to complain. He just had to make the most of his chance.

Shots scattered all around him several times before he managed to reach cover. He was bleeding from several places. He knew that his body could bleed out, so he needed to be careful about moving too much. Once he was away from the main area of action, he pushed himself up against a wall and calculated how much blood he’d lost. Too much to do anything strenuous, but not so much that he was going to be in serious trouble. A blood transplant would be ideal, and he was definitely slightly woozy from the head wound, but he couldn’t seek out any medical help. He had to get away.

Carefully, he pushed himself up off the ground and stood up shakily. He couldn’t feel the pain that his body was in right now, but he could feel it reacting. His movement speed was down and his hands were shaking. He pulled the hood up over his head to try and hide some of the blood. He had no idea where he would go from here or how bad his injuries looked, but he needed to get far away before the people who had been controlling him realised where he was.

He walked for a while. His movement was mostly stable, if slow because of how fatigued his body was from blood loss, and he didn’t encounter any further problems. He had a good memory of the layout of the city, so he started heading pretty much in the opposite direction of the place where he’d been based before. He was never, ever going back there.

-

There was something going on in the centre of the city. The warnings flashed up to Akhos the moment the troubles started. They still warned him about potential dangers to Patroka, even though he was no longer entirely fulfilling the role he had been set. In these times, when there was strife, he was always torn. He wanted to keep Patroka away, yes, but he also liked seeing things in action. Conflict was so dramatic.

“Something’s going on again,” he said with a sigh, and Patroka sat up a little straighter from where she was lounging against the wall. They’d been in this abandoned house for a few days now, and it was proving okay. Not particularly interesting, but it was safe. “Riots in the city centre. You’d think humans would learn that they’re fragile.”

“Do you want to go and see what’s going on in person?” She asked.

“No!” He said. “It’s too dangerous. The police opened fire on the protestors. I know it wouldn’t hurt, but it’s not like we can go and grab spare parts if something goes wrong. You shouldn’t put yourself at risk like that.”

“Live a little, Akhos!” She said. “I’ve been bored out of my mind here. I know we’re meant to be safe, and we could be caught on camera if we go anywhere where things are happening, but is it really living if we’re just sitting here? I want to do something on my own terms instead of doing nothing on theirs.”

“If we stay safe,” he said, “it’s still on our own terms. Choosing to be safe instead of putting ourselves at risk. I’d say it’s a choice I’m willing to make.” Even if he was decidedly unstimulated here, he just wanted Patroka to be safe. Not having a life was far worse than having a boring one.

Patroka sighed and looked away, not saying any more. He was bored, she was bored, and they had to make their own decisions now. "Fine," he said with a sigh. "We can go. But if it starts to get really bad, please leave. You know we can't afford for things to go wrong now we've got this far."

Patroka nodded, leaping up from where she was sat. "We'll be fine," she assured him, her face twisted into a smirk. "Neither of us are idiots. It'll be fun." Akhos considered objecting, saying that they were clearly both idiots if they were willingly going into a dangerous situation just because they were bored, but he didn't. He felt like things were going to be okay and he didn't want to piss Patroka off. He just had to stop worrying too much.

-

The nearest settlement wasn’t too far away. It was a town which basically only existed to be a slightly cheaper place to live than the nearby city. As long as he could get in and out of the town once without attracting too much suspicion, then they’d be set. Human finance protection was frail and Jin knew all about how to override it to get what he needed. The only problem was that he wanted to get things before Lora woke up and was hungry, but he didn’t want to leave her alone with Malos.

Malos was okay, and probably wouldn’t hurt him; that much he could tell from how incapacitated he was. But he’d tried to attack the pair of them knowing he was badly injured and unarmed. There was something unstable about Malos, and he didn’t fancy his chances while leaving him with a child. Something could go wrong and he’d never be able to forgive himself if Lora was hurt due to him.

“I want to get food and clothes for us,” Jin said, mostly to himself, though he had no idea if Malos was listening or not. The other blade was sat on a seat a few rows away, staring out of the window and into the forest. Jin couldn’t imagine what he’d be looking at out there, seeing as it was starting to get quite dark. “But we’ll have to wait until Lora wakes up.”

“She can’t come with us if we go anywhere,” Malos said. “She lived near here, presumably. There will be people looking for her, and her getting captured on camera will only make things harder for us.”

“I won’t leave her here,” he said. “And you can’t come anywhere until I find a coat to cover that missing arm. It’s very obvious that you’re a blade, and damaged. Damaged blades are meant to return to their owners or commanders for repair, so you’ll immediately attract attention.”

“I thought you were going to help patch that up, actually,” Malos said with a small frown. “I get what you mean. So leave the girl with me. I may not be much use for defending her right now but I don’t think anyone will come looking here.”

Jin didn’t want to tell Malos he didn’t trust him. He didn’t know what the man would do in that situation, how he would react. “I can patch you up a bit,” he said, hoping that was enough to deflect the conversation for now. He’d planned to use himself as a foil for Lora being recognised; they were expecting a lone runaway child, not a child with a blade.

Malos moved over to sit in the seat just across from Jin as he reached into his pack to bring out his medical kit. It was very limited, meant only for patching up a comrade or patching himself up in the field. If a blade got into any real trouble, they could die. They were replacable. But this would do the trick for the moment. Sitting here with Malos so close, things didn’t seem to be looking too bad for him. He seemed to have stabled out a bit too, which could only be good.

-

Jin’s hands weren’t warm, but they were...something. Malos could tell, even without most of his memories (everything before coming to properly from the crash was just a blur of resentment he didn’t want to probe too hard), that he hadn’t felt contact with others very much. There was something about Jin, something alluring, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Jin looked up at him with the dark blue eyes that had frozen him on the spot only hours before. Blades didn’t have real human eyes, he remembered, and he only really recalled Lora’s eyes (he had data on thousands of other human faces but he couldn’t be sure the data was right), but he found it hard to believe that Jin’s eyes were just borne of simulation.

He was surprisingly gentle, for someone who was obviously designed for combat. His touch barely brushed his skin, applying the film that would hopefully seal the holes in his outer layer and prevent anything from being damaged. Neither of them spoke, but Malos felt profoundly lost for words anyway. There was something...something. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t have a word for it, despite the breadth of the vocabulary stored in his data banks (unless there was a word for it that had managed to get corrupted).

“Done here,” Jin said, and Malos tried not to twitch when he checked the seal by prodding around the edge of it. That felt strange. “I’ll move to your chest now. You’re lucky it didn’t hit any vital components, judging by the placement of it. Were you in an explosion?”

“I think so,” he said. “And something was definitely hit, because my memory is basically empty at this point, it’s so corrupted.”

“Strange,” Jin said. “Normally memory banks are located in the head or neck and you don’t have any damage there. Do you have any specs left on where your vital components are?”

He thought for a moment. “I have no idea,” he said. That was probably vital information that he needed that was now gone. Great. “Just patch me up and we’ll hope I don’t shut down.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jin said, and then they lapsed into silence again as he moved to stretch the film over Malos’ chest. This was even stranger than before, because Jin was so close to some very important parts, it looked like.

Trust. That was it. That was the feeling he held for Jin, yet they’d only met a few hours before. He trusted Jin enough to put his life in his hands. Maybe it was because he had no other option, or because he didn’t remember any other people. But he felt an attachment to Jin, inexplicably, and even now Jin had helped him be safe to go their separate ways, he didn’t think they would.


	6. Questions

Well, Akhos thought, it was certainly exciting in the city centre at the moment. People were running everywhere, sirens were blaring, shots could be heard in the distance, people were waving banners and taking photos and making phone calls. It was chaos, there was so much to process, and it was exactly the opposite of boring. It was stimulating, even, to be there. He felt bad for those who were involved, but empathy didn't come all that naturally to him when it came to humans, at least after what they did to him and mostly Patroka.

"This is better," Patroka said. "No more sitting and staring at a wall or tracking bugs along the floor. See, Akhos? It's fine here. We're not in any danger."

"I'd beg to differ," he said, though he was enjoying it all the same. "I doubt it would happen, but it feels like half the city has a camera out at the moment. If someone who was looking for us looked through the footage, they'd find us."

"And what would they do?" She asked. "They'd know we're still alive and together. They wouldn't know where we were hiding, or why we were out here. Stop second guessing our decisions, Akhos. We're fine."

He considered her words for a moment and then nodded. "Do you want to get closer?" He asked. "We're not going into the square. But anything that isn't a protest, they're leaving it alone. We may as well make the most of this experience."

Patroka barely even thought about it before she headed in the direction of a fairly narrow street. The houses here were close together and there was barely enough space for two people to walk side by side, so Akhos moved to be behind Patroka as they walked. He stayed alert the whole time, making sure there were no imminent threats. He didn't want to make this more dangerous than it already was just through his carelessness.

Someone coming in the opposite direction, however, clearly had no such scruples about taking care in public. A child, maybe a head shorter than both of them, moved at a steady but shaky pace towards them, and when they crossed, the child bumped into Patroka, cried out, and fell to the ground.

"Watch where you're going, kid!" Patroka snapped. The child stood up, said nothing, and just looked at them both with an open mouth for a moment. It was as if they froze, and then Akhos realised. It was the child that had really started Patroka's doubts. She had been so afraid and Patroka had hated treating them so brutally.

"You're-" Akhos said, and the child just kept staring. "You're the girl from-"

"I'm not," the child said, her voice shaky and dry. "I'm not a girl, you're wrong. The wrong person." Something was stilted in their speech, decidedly hesitant, as if they hadn't spoken in a while. After the words had left their mouth, they swayed on their feet.

"You're going to have to catch them," he mumbled to Patroka, who was staring back at the child. Her face was full of conflict between her annoyance and the past pain of hurting this child. And, honestly, it wasn't just his concern for their wellbeing that made Akhos say what he did. He wanted to know what had happened to them after Patroka turned them in to the person giving orders.

"Fine," she whispered, shifting her posture to be slightly more open just as the child's eyes rolled back and they fell forwards into Patroka's now outstretched arms.

-

He woke up in a bed and was immediately alarmed. He was like this every time he woke up; unsure of when his mind had fallen asleep and afraid of what would happen in another day of being unable to control his own movements. But it only lasted a few moments, because he could move, but then the fear returned. Why was he here, and where was he? Who had brought him here? The last thing he remembered was steadily making his way down a vaguely familiar street. 

He couldn’t work out how he’d managed to get here. Maybe he’d wandered back to where he always returned after a mission. For him to blank out like that and wake up in a bed, he must have been more damaged than he thought. But he could still move, which didn’t make any sense, because if he’d been found by the people who’d been controlling him then they would have checked him over for damage. Which meant...he must be somewhere else. Someone else had helped him.

Carefully, he pulled the blanket away from the upper half of his body, noticing that he was in the same clothes as before. They had a not insignificant amount of dried blood on them, which made sense considering how much his head and back still hurt. He sat up slowly, and, predictably, felt a bit funny for a few moments. He didn’t understand how his mind was meant to interact with his body, but he would have thought that blood rushing to his head was one thing he didn’t need. Then again, he didn’t understand it; the people working on him had never needed to tell him.

He was in a fairly small room, and his shoes were there at the foot of the bed. Those must have been taken off him, because he had no memory of taking them off himself. Had he passed out somewhere? He probably needed to thank whoever had helped him, because dropping off in the middle of a street while escaping being shot at would probably have caused his death without whoever helped.

He could hear voices in the room next to him. Hushed voices, impossible to hear, especially as it seemed like at least one of his ears had been damaged by the proximity to gunfire, so he turned on his hearing receptors. The left one was busted, but enough remained for him to hear what was going on.

“...should still be safe. No one saw us come in here, the streets were basically deserted. Honestly, Akhos, I’d like to go out again. I hate stewing here waiting for nothing to happen. I know you want to be safe, but it’s boring! If anything, you put us at risk.” A woman’s voice, fairly angry. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the voice registered. It must have been the person who picked him up.

“You know as well as I do that we couldn’t leave them there,” a man’s voice, slightly softer, said. “They probably would have died in that alley. They could be dying now, I know nothing about human medicine.”

“So we need to take them somewhere they can get help,” the woman said. “A hospital. Where they know how to deal with humans. I’m sure they’re dealing with plenty of people with the same injuries right now.”

He felt fear seize his heart for a moment. He didn’t know how well he’d be able to bluff if he ended up in hospital, and if he was somewhere with a lot of people then there were so many people who could potentially be working for the people who were controlling him. Or maybe they’d be looking for him in a hospital, knowing that he was probably injured. But he didn’t know how to express that to these strangers who had been so helpful to him so far. They’d unknowingly done so much for him already.

He should do or say something, but now he just felt frozen. They were talking about him and hadn’t meant him to hear. They thought he was human. But they didn’t know how to deal with humans. Was the man, Akhos, a mechanic, or was he..? If the pair were blades, he knew they’d turn him in the moment they knew who he was. Blades weren’t capable of doing anything other than following orders, which had been shown by his own actions in the last couple of days.

“I’m going to go and check on him, see if his pulse is steady,” the man said, and that only made his heart rate leap again. He was glad he’d decided not to put his shoes on just yet and he jumped back over to the bed so he could pretend he’d only just woken up. As he did so, the whole room swam and he ended up falling back onto the bed anyway, his vision going fuzzy. Ugh. He’d definitely lost more blood than he’d initially calculated, there was no other reason his body would react like this.

The man opened the door to the room about twenty seconds later, leaving him just enough time to compose himself and close his eyes, only to open them when the man came into the room. He was vaguely but not very familiar, in a sort of way that made his mind stutter. Akhos wasn’t too tall, though he doubted that he could overpower him considering there was someone else in the next room, and his blue eyes were definitely sizing him up. “You’re awake,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Where am I?” He asked. There was no point chasing around what he needed to know. “I- was in an alleyway. I think I was badly injured. Thank you for helping me, if you did.”

“I did,” he said. “My friend and I carried you back here. You passed out towards the city centre, and we’re on the western outskirts right now, near the railway station.” That was surprisingly easy. He knew roughly where he was now, which put him slightly at ease. At least two miles from where he’d been before.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m feeling sort of dizzy, but mostly okay. My head hurts.”

“I wasn’t sure how to approach helping you,” he said. “Do you feel well enough to stand? I think it’s better if you stay here for a few hours to get your bearings, but I need to work out whether you need to go to hospital or not.”

“I should be fine,” he said immediately. “A bit more rest would be appreciated.” He needed to get back on his feet and work out an action plan, after all. He also needed food, but he didn’t know if there’d be any here if these people were blades. 

“Glad to hear,” Akhos said, offering a small smile which he managed to return. “I’m Akhos. What’s your name?”

“Mic-” he said, on auto-pilot. He was so used to introducing himself with the name he’d been using for the last few days. The name he was registered to recognise.

“Mik?” Akhos asked. “Is that short for anything?”

“Not really,” he bluffed. It should probably be short for something at some point, but that could wait until he had time to think about it. “Just Mik.”

“Nice to see you okay, Mik,” he said. “Do you remember much of the last week?” His brain stuttered again, trying to work out what was going on, but nothing surfaced. He shook his head, knowing this was blowing any semblance of cover he had but unable to stop himself. “I think we have some talking to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, it means a lot to gain even a tiny amount of feedback :) writing is very time consuming but understanding how readers feel is huge to me. Even if you don't have much to say, just saying your general opinion or a bit you liked, or what you think might happen next, is absolutely amazing.


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